Sarah Arthurs has a B.A. in Theology, a Masters in Educational Psychology and is a Registered Psychologist. She has worked as a therapist, college instructor, parent educator, community developer and...

Peter is the Founder of Axiom News. He has also founded and led a community newspaper and a corporate communications agency. He has served as a member and chairperson on the boards and committees of...

Cormac Russell is Managing Director of Nurture Development, Director of ABCD Europe and a faculty member of the Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute at Northwestern University, Chicago...

Newest Blogs

“The future of journalism is to play a fundamental and important role in an ecology of community development works and capacities and professions,” says Peter Pula, founder of Axiom News and pioneer of Generative Journalism.

Peter is now co-leading a local initiative to bring citizen-led dialogue and community development in direct partnership with the media.

Both journalists and the public have a role to play in reinventing journalism that supports communities to thrive. I see journalists grappling with two bedrock elements of their work: their relationship with truth and the ethics of engagement.

Sex is great. Especially when you are young… All the hugging and kissing and stuff that young people do… keep doing when they get older, except that now… sometimes… by a process that remains quite a mystery to me, they also get pregnant… It is a mystery how that happens.

It stands out as a bright and proud moment. I was a newly minted “professional” mingling with the accomplished-yet-astoundingly-generous front-runners of the Appreciative Inquiry community; David Cooperrider, Ada-Jo Mann, Diana Whitney, Jen Hetzel-Silbert, to name a few. As I offered my business card, I will never forget the brightened eyes and genuine exclamations of delight and curiosity at the sight of my title, “Generative Journalist.”

After a year of disheartening setbacks, many activists and change-makers may feel that the critical goal of transforming capitalism is slipping out of reach. Yet, having just returned from a four-week trip to many sites and gatherings working on social, economic, and spiritual renewal, I feel that the opposite is true. There are more fascinating and eye-opening examples of this transformation emerging worldwide than ever before.

In 2015, the year Axiom News gave birth to the Peterborough Dialogues, over 100 gatherings were hosted. I was asked by an astounded colleague in Europe, why would anyone do that? Well, to know and to serve. That’s why.

The Welfare State is an important extension of our human community’s capacity to care; not a replacement for it. Communities produce care (full-stop) and the systems or service world should simply be the support to that care where required, a resource to carers and not the source of care.

We have become so remarkably accustomed to a form of leadership that comes from the top. Why? Well, because it is easier for everybody. It is easier for the leader because they can indulge in their narcissism. And, well, we want them to. You see, if they are shaping things according to their filters and persona then we can move in a direction that is embodied by the leader.

As anxieties about an economically unstable future grow globally, there is an alternative mindset much closer to home—literally just around the corner, in fact. Instead of relying on federal policy, our local communities are constructing an economy and a way of being that promises more stability and more local control.